wonderful fireplace with the Dutch tiles that graphically
depicted the story of Jonah and the whale.

Here the general lay in state. The slaves had dressed their old
master in the uniform he had worn as a colonel of the continental
line, but the thin shoulders of the wasted figure no longer
filled the buff and blue coat. The high-bred face, once proud
and masterful no doubt, as became the face of a Quintard, spoke
of more than age and poverty--it was infinitely sorrowful. Yet
there was something harsh and unforgiving in the lines death had
fixed there, which might have been taken as the visible impress
of that mystery, the bitterness of which had misshaped the dead
man's nature; but the resolute lips had closed for ever on their
secret, and the broken spirit had gone perhaps to learn how poor
a thing its pride had been.

Though he had lived continuously at the Barony for almost a
quarter of a century, there was none among his neighbors who
could say he had looked on that thin, aquiline face in all that
time. Yet they had known much of him, for the gossip of the
slaves, who had been his only friends in those years he had
chosen to deny himself to other friends, had gone far and wide
over the county.

That notable man of business, Jonathan Crenshaw--and this
superiority was especially evident when the business chanced to
be his own--was closeted in the library with a stranger to whom
rumor fixed the name of Bladen, supposing him to be the legal
representative of certain remote connections of the old
general's.